AFP - French workers Wednesday released four managers held hostage for 24 hours at a Caterpillar bulldozer plant, after the US firm offered to reopen talks on layoffs under French state mediation.
   
Employees at the factory barricaded their bosses inside an office on Tuesday after talks on compensation for the 733 workers facing redundancy management broke down.
   
Factory director Nicolas Polutnik was released along with the head of personnel and two other managers, according to an AFP reporter at the plant.
   
A fifth executive, human resources director Maurice Petit, who has heart problems, had been allowed to leave Tuesday.
   
The breakthrough came after President Nicolas Sarkozy offered to meet union leaders from the plant to hear their demands.
   
Pierre Piccarreta, CGT union leader at the plant in the southeastern city of Grenoble, said talks would resume between workers, representatives from both Caterpillar's European and US headquarters, and French state officials.
   
He also said Caterpillar management had agreed to put an offer of compensation on the table for staff forced into part-time work.
   
Speaking to reporters at the plant, Polutnik said Caterpillar had "agreed to the unions' demand for payment for the three days of the strike as a gesture of appeasement."
   
"There is a condition, which is for the site to be evacuated, for us to be free to come and go as we please, and for the strike order to be lifted to allow negotiations to go ahead."
   
He did not confirm the offer of compensation for part-timers.
   
The action was the latest in a spate of so-called "bossnappings" in France as anger mounts over the global economic crisis, and Sarkozy and his ministers have taken a cautious approach to the protests.